


Yellow and Red|Fires and Flowers

by I_See_The_Stars_15



Series: Secrets Kept Close, Feelings Pushed Away [6]
Category: Hermitcraft RPF
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Flower Crowns, Gen, Mild Blood, No Dialogue, Nostalgia, One Shot, Self-Reflection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-13
Updated: 2020-06-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:41:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24697750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/I_See_The_Stars_15/pseuds/I_See_The_Stars_15
Summary: The night feels similar, but still too different, still too lonely for him to enjoy.
Series: Secrets Kept Close, Feelings Pushed Away [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1775941
Comments: 2
Kudos: 46





	Yellow and Red|Fires and Flowers

His hand goes over the field, watching carefully for flowers to pluck off the ground. He comes across a newly-bloomed daisy, still wet with morning dew, and stops. He kneels in front of it, and carefully, gently, digs out its roots and stem, plucking his hand on a thorn. He doesn’t mind, not really. He doesn’t even feel the pain until he sees the red dripping from his fingers. Dazed, he stares at the wound before pressing down, stopping the flow so it doesn’t taint the off white of the flower in front of him.

When he puts it up to the sky, against the backdrop of the setting sun, he sees its true beauty. Smiling, he carefully drops it into his inventory before leaving the field, flying high with his elytra.

He doesn’t use rockets to speed his flight, instead letting himself slowly glide with the wind. It’s cooling, and quiet, only the soft puffs of air from his lungs disturbing the temporary peace. He sees his megabase in front of him: sees the pillars and the quartz and the lanterns and flies straight beyond it, going farther until he can see the wacky buildings of Tango’s Toon Towers. He dodges the fireball that comes out of his friend’s newest build, and starts descending, skilfully maneuvering through the spaces between the colorful complexes.

His landing isn’t as smooth as he wants it to be, and he feels his knees scrape against the ground. On his hands and knees, he takes a deep breath and collects himself. He hears mobs nearby, and so fetches a few torches from his inventory and holds it in his hand, the soft glow lighting his path.

He enters a patch of dense forest, and places a few torches on the barks of the oak trees. The orange glow steadies him, even when he’s shot in the shoulder by a lucky skeleton’s arrow. He has his armor in his ender chest, but he’d rather not put it on and feel suffocated under its weight. He dispatches the mob as quick as he can, taking out his sword and running once the monster is just another pile of bones. Once he approaches a cleared out patch of ground, he lets himself relax and collapse into a heap on the ground. Sighing, he rummages through his inventory, and pulls out a campfire that he lights in the middle. Shifting so that he’s leaning on one of the trees, he takes a deep breath of the smoke. He doesn’t know how long he just sits there, staring at the hypnotic shift of red, orange and yellow, he just knows it’s quiet.

He looks through his inventory and pulls out the heaps of flowers he collected from the fields. They still look fresh, although some have started to decay. The last daisy he picked is no longer wet, but is still as clean as it was, and is much more magnificent in the glow of the campfire. He picks out similar looking ones, and those with complimentary colors and starts bunching them together with string.

He pricks himself multiple times on stray thorns he forgot to remove, and the drops stain the green grass below him, turning the exposed patches of dirt more maroon. He doesn’t pay it much attention, although when he does feel dizzy from pain and hunger, he would put his project down to munch on some golden carrots, the sweet taste filling his mouth and replacing the saltiness coming from the tears he doesn’t know the source of.  
He continues working until he has made three rings of flowers and string, crowns of tulips and lilies and poppies and daisies providing color in the field. He leaves two on the ground in front of him, and gently cradles the last: a mixture of yellow tulips and dandelions, with that perfect oxeye daisy as the centerpiece. The white petals seem more like clouds in his hands, and the flowers like golden nuggets blinding him with nostalgia. He places the crown on his head, and still feels the phantom pain of thorns digging into his forehead. 

He closes his eyes, head tilted up at the sky filled with twinkling stars and starts to sing a soft tune. The lyrics tell a story he has etched into his heart, and the melody crowds him in memories of a simpler time. He knows his voice isn’t the best. It doesn’t flow as smoothly as Ren’s, nor does it blend as well as Grian’s, but he manages to make it still seem as though they were with him. The crown on his head no longer feels heavy with the thoughts of the past, and instead embrace him in a warmth he hasn’t felt in a long time. He closes his eyes and for a moment he pretends that the Toon Towers are replaced by Falsewell, that across the sea, it’s Scar with Doc, hiding not behind wood but black and yellow concrete, holed up in Area 77.

He imagines that the clearing he is in is bigger, with him leaning against the cool metal of an RV instead of the rough scratch of wood. He imagines that the zombies moaning and the creepers hissing around him are but his friends, laughing and singing along. He opens his eyes and thinks for a brief moment that the smoke is hiding two figures both in red. He looks down at the flower crowns before him and his hands twitch. It’s not enough to fill the space their figures left behind, not yet. He still has plenty of flowers after all.

His hands are moving before he realizes it, twisting and plucking and forming almost circular figures. He isn’t as quick as Ren, nor are his arrangements as beautiful as Grian’s, but it most certainly looks like the ones they wore in their earlier days together, when plans were not yet set in stone and travelling to the past seemed so far away.

His humming starts to sound like the hum of the time machine, his fidgeting hands feeling like they did when they fidgeted with the insides of the contraption, and he’s lost in memories of too dark caves and too long nights, of visits from myths and stories that fit in legends. He’s back there in Alpha with them, blocking the walls to stop arrows, and laughing at their pitiful attempts to make a home with the meager materials they have.

He stops when a sharp pain erupts from his hand. Looking down, he sees that a particular thorn has embedded itself into his thumb, the wound bleeding profusely. He winces as he pulls it out, seeing the blood drip on the crown he was working on. The campfire’s light dwindles slightly from the lack of fuel, and he lets out a disappointed sigh. He goes through a few more golden carrots, trying to ignore the heavy feeling in his chest. If anyone were to see him now, alone in an empty clearing, crying as he stuffs his mouth with golden carrots, he knows they would think he’s pitiful. He is pitiful, having gotten too caught up in the past to the point that he feels too hollow to think of the future.

He lets some of the tears fall. It doesn’t make sense to him, how he could have grown so attached to that group in the weeks they hung out. He was never one to seek out other’s company, nor did he make the effort to connect with the other hermits as well as he connected with Tango and Zedaph, yet he finds himself aching for their presence in his life. Perhaps it’s just their natural charisma, or their shared smiles by the fire, or the general energy that was in their deceptively laid back camp that drew him in, but he was thoroughly stuck in wishes for the past.

The memories don’t want to leave him, and he is unsure if he wants them to leave. They bring with them a flood that threatens to drown him, but he likes the cold feeling of water surrounding his heated emotions. He tries to move on but they hold him back when he sees their conversations through chat, or when he catches wind of one of their newer collaborations. He has his own friends to worry about, his own business ventures he has to prioritize yet he sometimes finds himself wanting to reach out and stay with them again like they did back when they were hippies.

The tears have long dried on his face by the time he reaches a hand up to wipe them. The stars have started to fade, and in their place, the sun peeks over the horizon. The deep blue of the sky is streaked with yellow and he tries to ignore the shaking of his hands. He removes the flowers from his head, and sees the daisy staring almost mockingly at him. Tightening his grip and crushing the ring of yellow in his hands, he approaches the dying campfire and throws it in, watching with blurry eyes as the petals turn to ash. The fire goes out not long after, having used the last of its fuel to burn the crown. His head still feels too heavy, still feels like it’s spinning, and he turns around with a twinge of sadness.

He doesn’t turn around when he flies, no matter how much his heart wants to. It wouldn’t make a difference in the end. He leaves behind the piles of flowers, and hopes that the memories in his heart wilt with the floral crowns left on the floor.

The sun is still not up when he reaches his base, and the light of sea lanterns don’t provide the same warmth that the campfire did. He goes to the space he considers his bedroom and stops in front of a hidden chest. He reaches inside and pulls out a bunch of dried petals, rough, shrunken and having lost their color a long time ago. They weren’t the same flowers, he left those behind in the previous world, but they were close enough that when he saw them he knew he had to keep them. He takes a handful and places them beneath his pillow, a ritual for the sleepless nights that happened too frequently in their new world. Laying his head on the bed, he closes his eyes and forces his body to relax. He doesn’t dream tonight, and for some reason it makes him feel worse.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed this small fic! I appreciate you taking the time to read this. If you have any character suggestions, leave them below and I might consider writing for them. Thank you for all the support!


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